With companies spending hundreds – if not thousands – of pounds these days on marketing and advertising, it’s not just enough to have “a website” out there somewhere in the ether; it has to be easily found by the average user, and this means it has to be optimised for the lean, mean search engines that crawl and index millions of websites on a daily basis.

In this blog I won’t be going into detail on the intricacies of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but I will cover some of the tips I’ve picked up over the last few years that may be some help.

1 – Write Good Code!

Too many websites use bad/unreadable/invalid code that does display the website correctly in the vast majority of browsers, but is very hard for a search engine (like Google) to crawl and understand. Search engines see only the (X)HTML markup of the page, without any formatting controls like CSS (whether in-line or external) – they don’t see the graphics and layout that you and I see.

The most efficient way to combat this is to write clean, efficient and valid code that separates content from presentation by using CSS to control formatting and XHTML to control layout. Tables should be used for displaying data, while <div> tags should be used for content separation. Sticking to the W3C XHTML specification (either the Strict or Transitional DTD) is key to this, as it allows all websites to comply to a central standard. Making sure your website is valid code isn’t just for completeness, search engines care about neat code as well because it makes their jobs easier.

2 – Be descriptive!

Following on from point 1 above,  be as descriptive as possible with both your alternate image text and link text. Because search engines only see text, all images are converted to their text equivalent, which is defined in the XHTML code as the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. Being more descriptive in your alternate text helps the crawlers to understand and index your website more easily. It also allows your images to be indexed by specialist image crawlers (for example Google Images), opening up more entry points into the website.

Try not to use the classic “click here” for hyperlinks for the same reason. More descriptive link text not only helps the search engines, but also helps your user in deciding what links are worth clicking.

3 – Use Links Wherever Possible

A good trick I use quite a lot is to put a link back to the website’s homepage and either my personal website or my freelance portfolio in the footer of the page. This creates both an inbound link to the target website and an outbound link from your website, and increases the number of pages your site relates to in the eyes of crawlers, therefore giving you slightly better rankings.

4 – Use <meta> Tags!

The use of <meta> tags to describe the content and purpose of the website varies slightly between browsers and crawlers. Some crawlers just look for <meta> tags, others crawl the entire page and index content, some do both – so try to make those <meta> tags as descriptive and representative as possible. The “keywords”, “content” and “author” flavours all have different roles, and any websites putting random words into the “keywords” tag in the hope of getting hits for unrelated keywords will be ranked down, as well websites with unrelated “content” tags, so try to be as on-topic and relevant as possible.

5 – Choose a Good URL!

It’s extremely important to choose a URL that reflects the topic of the website, as search crawlers try to tie these two together. Long addresses will be harder for visitors to remember, so a balance is needed between descriptiveness and length. If the name you want is taken (and it often is), try looking for other Top-Level Domains (TLDs) like .org and .co.uk instead of the obvious .com, although .org domains are generally used for non-profit organisations so it’s generally a good idea to keep within the intended use for the TLD if possible.

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Hopefully the above points have enabled you to optimise your website and get it further into the rankings without going into too much detail. The key thing to remember however is that SEO is by no means an exact practice. It may take day, weeks or months for a crawler to index your website and even longer for it torise up the rankings, so have patience!